‘Light in a bottle’ liquid can harvest and store energy from multiple sources

A new type of liquid can harvest and store energy from light to act as a rechargeable power source. The liquid contains a molecule that absorbs electrons from light, which prompts a restructure into a jelly-like substance. This gel remains stable for months at a time and can release the stored electrons upon contact with oxygen to power chemical reactions. The research is still in very early stages, but such a metal-free energy storage system could one day be useful to power small devices such as smartwatches.

First ‘half Möbius’ carbon chain could unlock strange physical properties

Chemists have synthesised a new type of carbon-based molecule with an unprecedented twist in its structure. The team calls the looped molecule a ‘half-Möbius’, inspired by the Möbius strip — a twisted loop with one continuous surface. In the half-Möbius molecule, the chain of atoms is twisted by 90° to make the loop, instead of the full 180º seen in a standard Möbius strip. The molecule can exist in two versions depending on whether it twists left or right. The versions differ in chirality, meaning that they are mirror images of each other.

Tiny device only needs the Sun to lift off

A device takes advantage of the properties of two layers of material to levitate using only the power of sunlight. The top layer is transparent, allowing sunlight to shine through it, and the bottom layer absorbs that sunlight. Gas molecules moving from the cold transparent layer to the hot bottom layer creates a lift that is similar to that created by a helicopter’s whirring rotor, says engineer Igor Bargatin, who has pioneered work on similar devices.

Rare ‘ambidextrous’ protein breaks rules of handedness

Scientists have discovered an ancient protein that has the rare property of being ‘ambidextrous’ — it can function in mirror-image forms. The protein contains a structure that’s symmetrical around an axis, which allows both ‘left-handed’ and ‘right-handed’ versions to bind to normal and mirror-image DNA. Why the structure is ambidextrous is unclear, but “a crazy explanation” is that it could have evolved when ‘mirror life’ — containing left-handed nucleic acids and right-handed proteins — existed on Earth.

Powerful CRISPR system inserts whole gene into human DNA

A new genome-editing tool promises to insert entire genes, precisely and efficiently, into human DNA. The method uses a bacterial enzyme complex called a CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST), which can introduce full-length genes at targeted sites in a single step, without creating double-stranded breaks in DNA. Researchers used directed evolution — a process that harnesses the power of Darwinian natural selection in the lab — to produce an optimised version of the enzyme complex, called evoCAST, that showed a more than 400-fold improvement in efficiency over the non-evolved original.

All living things glow until they die

A new study hints that plants and animals — including people — emit a tiny glow when alive, which disappears after death. This ‘ultraweak photon emission’ — equivalent to a few photons a second per square centimetre of skin tissue — might be a byproduct of energy-producing processes within cells.

Microlightning in mist may have sparked life on Earth

The energy from ‘microlightning’ might have powered chemical reactions that formed the building blocks for life on Earth. When water sprays as a fine mist — after the crash of a wave, for example — it forms minute, charged droplets. The proximity of oppositely-charged droplets to one another generates an electrical discharge and a tiny flash of light. Researchers found that in the presence of gases including nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, microlightning caused the synthesis of molecules such as the amino acid glycine and uracil, a key component of RNA.

Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

Fragments collected from the asteroid Bennu contain the building blocks for life — all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA and 14 of the 20 amino acids needed to make known proteins. But there’s a twist: on Earth, amino acids in living organisms tend to have a ‘left-handed’ structure. Those on Bennu, however, contain nearly equal amounts of these structures and their ‘right-handed’, mirror-image forms. This calls into question a hypothesis favoured by many scientists that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

Chemical swaps give parrots their colours

Dusky lory parrots (Pseudeos fuscata) have a unique genetic change that allows them to sport a rainbow of colours. Pigments in their feathers called psittacofulvins, which are only found in parrots, are made up of carbon chains of varying lengths. These chains have an aldehyde group at one end by default when they’re synthesised, which makes the pigment red. Researchers found a gene in the dusky lory’s genome that encodes an enzyme that can modify the aldehyde into a carboxyl group, which changes the pigment’s colour to yellow.

AlphaFold reveals how sperm and egg hook up in intimate detail

Researchers have identified three proteins that work together as matchmakers between sperm and egg cells. They used the artificial-intelligence tool AlphaFold to predict the interactions between proteins of sperm cells. It predicted that three such proteins form a complex, which creates a place for an egg protein to bind.

Carbon bond that uses only one electron seen for first time

Scientists have observed a single-electron covalent bond between two carbon atoms for the first time. Researchers synthesized a molecule with a stable ‘shell’ of fused carbon rings that stretched out a carbon–carbon bond in its centre. The pull makes it susceptible to losing one electron in an oxidation reaction, leaving the elusive one-electron bond. With the new finding, the team hopes to better understand what defines a chemical bond in the first place.

The biology of smell is a mystery — AI is helping to solve it

We smell by detecting molecules around us — but knowing the chemical structure of a molecule tells you almost nothing about its odour. Even categorising what we perceive is difficult: there is no palette of scent ‘primary colours’ as there is for vision. And olfactory receptor proteins are hard to work with, so what they look like and how they function has mostly been guesswork. But that isn’t stopping scientists from trying, with help from innovations in structural biology, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Heaviest element yet within reach after major breakthrough

Researchers have demonstrated a new way to make superheavy elements, opening the door to creating the heaviest element ever and adding another row to the periodic table. Scientists used a beam of titanium to make a known superheavy element, livermorium — element 116. If they’re able to make elements 119 and 120, as planned after an equipment upgrade, they will be the first documented from the eighth ‘period’. In this row, scientists expect to find atoms with so-far unseen electron configurations.

Elusive element coaxed into compound

Promethium, a rare and mysterious radioactive element from the far reaches of the periodic table, has been made into a ‘complex’ for the first time. In this type of compound, promethium is bound to a few surrounding molecules. The feat fills a long-standing gap in our knowledge of chemistry and could lead to better methods for separating promethium from similar elements in nuclear waste, for example.

Goldene: a single layer of gold atoms

Goldene is a cousin of graphene, the single-atom-thick sheet of carbon first discovered in 2004 — but made of gold. Goldene is roughly 400 times as thin as the thinnest commercial gold leaf, and might find use as a catalyst, or in light-sensing devices.

AI helps design antibodies from scratch

For the first time, an artificial intelligence (AI) system has helped researchers to design completely new antibodies. Creating new versions of these immune proteins, which can be used as drugs, is usually a lengthy and costly process. An AI algorithm similar to those of the image-generating tools Midjourney and DALL·E was trained on thousands of real-world structures of antibodies attached to their target proteins. It then churned out thousands of new antibodies that recognize certain bacterial, viral or cancer-related targets.

1.75-billion-year-old fossils help explain how photosynthesis evolved

The oldest fossil evidence of photosynthesis has been found inside tiny cyanobacteria that lived around 1.75 billion years ago, 1.2 billion years earlier than the previous record-holder. The photosynthetic structures, known as thylakoids, were found inside fossilised Navifusa majensis. Cyanobacteria are thought to have triggered the Great Oxidation Event more than 2 billion years ago, which transformed Earth’s atmosphere.

AI Robot chemist could make oxygen on Mars

A robotic chemist powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can make oxygen from water using only materials found on Mars’s surface. The refrigerator-sized machine separated and analysed ore from Martian meteorites, and then found an effective oxygen-generating catalyst among the more than three million possible compounds — all without human intervention. A similar robot could be sent to Mars to remove the need for astronauts to carry oxygen, or the materials to generate it, from Earth.

AI predicts chemicals’ smells from their structures

An artificial-intelligence system can describe how compounds smell simply by analysing their chemical structures. The neural network can provide descriptions, such as ‘grassy’, for hundreds of molecules, including some that don’t exist in nature. Smell is the only sensory input that goes directly from the sensory organ to the brain’s memory and emotional centres without passing through other brain regions — which is why scents can evoke specific, intense memories.

Impurity quashes superconductivity claim

LK-99, reportedly the first-ever room-temperature superconductor, is not one after all. Dozens of replication efforts have shown that impurities in the material were responsible for properties that were similar to those exhibited by superconductors — a sharp drop in electrical resistivity and levitation over a magnet.